


Two Trips Taken

by calderaNightOwl



Series: Fate Came Early [1]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25596595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calderaNightOwl/pseuds/calderaNightOwl
Summary: McCoy is six hours into his shift when a blond man with startling blue eyes abducts him straight from the halls of the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Relationships: James T. Kirk & Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Series: Fate Came Early [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2070006
Comments: 5
Kudos: 59





	Two Trips Taken

The floor squeaks. Each sound his steps produce on the shiny tiles just overlays the various electromechanical noises of a hospital at night. McCoy’s eyes are used to the fluorescent light, and his body is adjusted to the long hours. So he’s as at ease as anyone ever really is in a building where people die on the daily when the man grabs him from behind.

One hand covers his mouth and the second has a hold pinning McCoy’s hands behind his torso.

“Don’t scream or make a scene, ok.” A voice says into his ear.

“Fucking hell!” He curses immediately when his mouth is free.

And it must be too loud for the man’s liking because now there’s the distinct round feel of a phaser barrel pushing into the small of his back.

“Quiet.”

McCoy curses at whisper volume this time. Doesn’t matter since the hallway is deserted anyways.

“Now, I’m going to let go of your hands and we’re going to move at a calm steady pace.” The man maneuvers McCoy out of the alcove he’d pulled him into and towards where McCoy knows a side entrance to the parking lot is located.

His brain kicks into gear, “You don’t need to do this.” Whatever _this_ is, McCoy still isn’t entirely sure. He’s a doctor, not some twentieth century bank teller, dammit! It’s not like surviving a holdup is part of their emergency drills.

The man chuckles, “Yes, I really do.” Sounding entirely too calm for the situation.

“You in some kind of trouble?” McCoy ventures, his mind jumping straight to organized crime. They still use physical threats don’t they?

“No. But you are, and I need you to fix it.”

“What?”

He doesn’t get an answer, as he’s pushed abruptly out a set of double doors, and led stumbling over the concrete curb of the sidewalk that’s thankfully still well-lit even in the dark.

McCoy doesn’t question the man again as he’s directed towards an old beat up pickup truck. Oh, fuck. This is real. They’re leaving the hospital and no one will ever find his body.

The panic freezes his limbs and it’s only as the man bodily throws him through the driver-side door and climbs in after, shoving him across the bench seat that McCoy thinks to fight.

The passenger-side door is locked when McCoy first tries it. He scrabbles with the buttons below the window. The truck lurches into motion. When he manages to get the click of the door unlocking, they’re already going what must be twice the land-speed limit. Way too fast to jump out from unless he wants to end up a pancake.

He vaguely registers their surroundings changing out the window as his hands clutch at the handle mounted on the door and his breath comes out in shallow wheezes.

“You need to calm down, Bones.” And McCoy turns to get his first good look at his captor. He must be hysterical because his first thought is that the man’s way too good looking to be a criminal. Blond hair and blue eyes. The works.

“Please- Please, I have a daughter. Whatever you want with me, I’ll do it. Just don’t make a little girl grow up without a father.” McCoy pleads. He can’t make eye contact while the man drives, but he watches the man’s expression turn grim.

That’s not good. Not good at all.

“You just have to do your job. Be a doctor, you can do that for me, right?”

McCoy nods to be agreeable, but he must have a death wish after all because the next thing he says is, “Helluva lot easier being a doctor at a hospital. Where there’s medical equipment and painkillers and anesthesia.”

“Don’t worry, we’ve got everything you’ll need. Now your patient was in a shuttle crash a little over fourteen hours ago. He’s been in and out of consciousness for the last twelve hours. We managed an emergency patch job, but it won’t hold forever.”

McCoy listens reluctantly but soaks up all the information out of habit. The piece of steel they had removed from the patient’s shoulder. The lacerations across the abdomen. The twisted ankle.

By the time they pull up to a cheap looking motel, McCoy’s got his head screwed back on straight in order to do his job. His mind doesn’t follow the errant thought that they’ll at least keep him alive long enough to do his doctoring. He’s so focused running potential scenarios that he’s not at all prepared for what he finds when he actually walks through the door.

“Oh, good lord.” He stops dead in the doorway.

A gentle shove to his shoulder has him moving again.

“What in the- Is this some kind of cloning shit?” Which makes no sense because the body in that bed might have his face staring back at him, but it’s still older than him. Well, about ten years older and thirty pounds of muscle heavier, if he’s being specific. But that would make him the clone, not the other way around.

“He’s you, and I’m him. We’re from the future. All clear now?” The man says, and McCoy follows his motioning to notice the kid at his not-clone’s bedside.

The teenager could be his captor’s kid brother for sure, if not his clone. There’s a bigger gap in looks between that set of lookalikes. While McCoy’s double has an easy thirty pounds on him, the teenager has yet to finish puberty so he’s missing more like fifty pounds, a couple of inches in height, and a couple inches across the shoulder.

“Are you going to fix him?” The teenager prompts him, coming to his feet.

Apparently McCoy can never say no to a good set of puppy-dog eyes, because he says, “Yeah, kid.” And gets to work.

◦◦◦

_Fourteen hours earlier_

Jim’s skipping class to fiddle with his bike in the old barn. He can’t skip very often since Frank would catch him sooner or later, but today’s one of about two days every month that Frank actually gets off his ass to go into town and Jim hadn’t been planning on missing the opportunity.

It’s frustrating him to no end that this day he finally gets without teachers or Frank on his back every other second is going to waste. He doesn’t have the parts to do the upgrade that he’d meticulously planned over the last three weeks. And he’d spent three hours this morning combing every last screw and nail in the boxes of old junk taking up space in every spare corner to be sure. Jim is now in possession of six more utility wrenches, but no closer to his dream bike upgrade.

He turns wrench number three over and over in his hands as he contemplates the pros and cons of bartering work for parts over at old man Peterson’s shop. Just then, a noise like none he’s heard before startles him so bad he fumbles the wrench into giving himself a bruise above his knee.

It’s like a whirring, the kind old rotor-lift air vehicles made when you stood way too close. A humming whir, whir, whir. Or maybe the crash of waves in the ocean, but instead of repeating rhythmically over and over, it’s one constant wave of noise undulating in tone rather than depth of volume.

Jim stands to investigate, but then it’s over as soon as it started. He still turns towards the door to check it out anyways, but a second later there’s a much more recognizable crash.

Half of the back wall of the barn flies inwards, imploding under the impact of what could be a half of a standard shuttle chassis. It’s hard to tell, what with the debris flying through the air.

Jim ducks and covers. He’s on the other side of the barn, but the twenty meters of distance between him and the wreck does a lot less to shield him from wood chips turned projectiles than the solid heft of the workbench he was previously standing beside.

A minute later the crash and tumble sounds of various overturned and off-balance pieces of barn wall and miscellaneous equipment finding their final resting places tapers off. Jim stands and is somewhat surprised to find nothing has gone up in flames.

“Mhnnh,” someone groans from the wreck. And Jim really should just stop being surprised at this point. As unlikely as a shuttle wrecking in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Iowa is, the likelihood of an _unmanned_ shuttle wrecking in nowhere Iowa is way smaller. Especially given that the shuttle chassis is clearly from a transport class not a freighter class. Way too small for large-scale shipping.

He circles the wreck slowly because he’s not an idiot. Being as cautious of the now potentially structurally unsound barn rafters as he is of whatever the contents of that shuttle hold.

There’s one man practically impaled on the metallic remnants of a bulkhead. Draped really, with his head dangling in a position that would be extremely uncomfortable if he wasn’t already unconscious.

Jim can see the back of a head on the the body strapped in the pilot’s chair. It’s moving in dazed motions. But Jim only takes note of it and the fact that there are no other bodies nearby before he turns back to the one in clear need of medical attention.

There’s a first aid kit, thankfully, on this side of the giant tear that broke the shuttle in two pieces. It’s secured into the underside of a storage bin that Jim rips open and starts pulling apart.

He takes all the bandages out of the top and digs for the medical tape before turning back to the man. If he’s not impaled anywhere vital, the real immediate risk for him is losing too much blood. There’s already a slow drip down the outside of the man’s left thigh making a small cluster of droplets on the floor that will soon turn into a small puddle if Jim doesn’t stop the bleeding.

Jim patches as much as he can without moving the man. He obviously needs to get un-impaled at some point. But right this second the pressure against his wounds from the metal is doing more to keep the man alive than Jim is.

There’s a shuffle coming up from behind him. Then a click that would have been innocuous if Jim didn’t recognize it as the sound of a phaser being set to charge.

“Back away from him.” A voice calls with the kind of command and authority that makes Jim’s hackles rise.

“I don’t think you really want me to do that. I’m the one keeping him alive here-” Jim exaggerates only slightly to make sure the one behind him won’t shoot to the detriment of his friend. He glances back, keeping his hands where they are to stem the bleeding as much as possible.

He chokes off his next words. It’s a stunned silence as he takes the man in.

“Shit.”

◦◦◦

_Now_

There’s something really freaky about looking at your own face this close and not having it match your movements in exact mirror. McCoy completely avoids the face. The body is muscled well enough that he can pretend it’s not him for a while if he tries hard.

But then his eyes inevitably catch on a certain cluster of freckles. And his mind supplies the scientific knowledge that not even clones have the exact same expression of surface dermatological features.

He’s just thankful that his patient is still unconscious.

His not-captor really hadn’t been lying when he said they had enough supplies for McCoy work with. The younger blond hands over a tricorder that he’d apparently been using to track vitals while the older blond acquired a doctor.

McCoy takes it. “What’s your name, kid?”

The teenager startles, and glances over at the older blond who had practically passed out on the second queen bed, like he’s surprised McCoy hadn’t already gotten an introduction.

“I’m Jim. Jim Kirk.”

“You can call me Leonard. Dr. Leonard McCoy.”

Jim makes a face, “You don’t seem like a Leonard.”

“Yeah, well. That’s my name, so get used to it. What other supplies do we have? Bandages? Anti-septic?”

Jim nods at asshole-Jim and says, “He calls you Bones.” With the kind of tone that implies Jim will be requisitioning the nickname for his own purposes. Then Jim gives him the rundown of their supply situation.

Turns out there’s a crate full of enough portable emergency military-grade medical equipment to stock a field hospital hiding on the other side of the bed.

McCoy steps around to rummage through it. If the story they’ve told him is true, his unconscious patient has lasted half a day so far, he probably won’t die in the next ten minutes.

His fingers run over the Starfleet insignia printed onto the side of the crate. None of the men in the room wore uniforms. Whether that’s because this Starfleet issue medical equipment wasn’t technically theirs or if they just changed out of the uniforms, McCoy doesn’t know. He doesn’t ask either.

“You know what this is?” He asks Jim, motioning to one of several similar devices.

“Bone knitter.” Jim nods.

“And this?” McCoy goes down the line of equipment. The kid gets every single identification correct. From the dermal regenerator to the allosteric homeostatic regulator.

“Congrats, kid, you’ve just earned a promotion to physician’s assistant. I tell you what I need and you hand it to me, got it?” 

“Got it.”

And he did have it. An hour of cleansing, mending, and repairing didn’t knock Jim off his game at all. McCoy was just as focused. His abduction and the shear absurdity of treating his future self left him with an adrenaline rush like none other.

He frowns down as he takes more readings. “The intravenous kit.” McCoy motions at Jim.

Jim protests when he starts prepping his own arm, “What are you doing?”

“Probably the same thing it looks like I’m doing. He needs a blood transfusion.” Or a blood replacement synthetic. But the synthetic was never as good as the real thing.

They’d ended up ripping open several wounds that had been near clotted closed in order for McCoy to repair the damage. And that had meant a lot more lost blood than the patient could afford. He was just glad that nothing had required surgery invasive enough to necessitate an operating room.

McCoy had given blood before, but he’d never administered this particular procedure. A whole blood transfusion straight from the source, with no clearance testing was considered practically barbaric by modern medical standards.

But the reasons for that standard were currently nonexistent. Unknown diseases, contamination, mix-matched blood types, potential for poor immune responses. None of those mattered when the man you were treating was more similar to yourself than a twin.

“Now I’m gonna do a half a liter. Shouldn’t be too much, but if I get woozy or pass out, you’re gonna have to stop the blood flow. Come here, see how I pinch the line like this?”

Jim listens attentively to his instructions but it turns out he doesn’t need them. McCoy stays upright and clear headed for the whole thing.

That’s right about when his patient starts coming around.

◦◦◦

_Then_

“Who the fuck are you?” Jim shouts at the blond man who’s lowered his phaser and started holding his hands up non-threateningly.

“Jim.” The man says and somehow, through something in his tone, Jim knows he’s not answering Jim’s question. He’s placating Jim to get him to calm down. It’s weird because he shouldn’t even know Jim’s name.

And then it gets weirder because he says, “Can you tell me what year this is?”

The man has taken his attention off of Jim and is glancing around assessing the remains of the barn, like he’s looking for something.

Jim doesn’t answer, still trying to wrap his mind around the impossibility of the man standing before him.

“The electro-blow torch. The one you used to attach the extra hydraulics to the bike. Where is it?”

Jim watches in stunned disbelief as the man starts moving in the correct direction to the set of drawers he keeps most of his tools in. Pulling out the blow torch he moves back toward Jim.

_He’s me. He’s me. He’s me._ Jim’s heart beats fast trying to keep up with the racing of his thoughts circling the track of those two words over and over again.

“I’m going to cut through the bulkhead. You need to keep him upright when he loses stability, alright.”

The man is suddenly up in Jim’s space and it manages to break through Jim’s thoughts. “Yeah.”

Jim focuses on the sound of the low ignition of the torch as it cuts through the sheet of metal. He doesn’t take his hands off of the wounds he’s holding shut until just before the torch cuts through the final few centimeters of material.

The cut is even and thorough, cleaving the structure from the unconscious man in Jim’s arms, but it doesn’t break away the way either of them had expected. The blond man who Jim can’t help but speculate about gives the metal a kick with finality and it groans and moves suddenly.

Instead of falling backwards like Jim had prepared for, the now un-impaled man falls forwards. Jim barely manages to catch him and pull him back before he falls face first onto the floor.

The blond man helps Jim brace before they maneuver him onto his back, and start patching all the places Jim hadn’t been able to access with the bulkhead in place.

A hacking cough from their patient displaces an unsecured bandage Jim had been in the process of placing. The man’s eyes flick open, features pinched against the pain.

“Bones! Bones, what else do you need?”

“Fuck.” He curses passionately, eyes darting back and forth between Jim and the blond man kneeling over him. “I think I’m seeing double, Jim.”

“Don’t think so. Explain later. Just tell me what you need.”

“Pain meds, the hypospray at the top of the kit with the green label.” The bleeding man raises his hands to his abdomen and starts palpitating around the bandages Jim applied. “If I’m bleeding internally you’ve got to get me to a doctor. A real doctor.”

“That’s gonna be a little tricky at the moment.” This other man who is also Jim says, returning with the requested hypospray and depressing it into his neck.

Jim speaks up, “Why? Why can’t we just take him to the hospital?” He may not like hospitals, but he understands their necessity.

“We’re from the future.” The blond man says, holding eye contact with Jim. And as much as Jim logically knows this is him, everything in him is screaming that it’s still not really him. The man is wearing a gold Starfleet uniform shirt. Jim can’t imagine what would ever make him join up with Starfleet.

“I got that.” Jim spits back, petulantly.

The man sighs. “Look, this isn’t really the first time this has happened.”

“Time travel?” Jim questions incredulously.

“Yes.” Old-Jim says emphatically. “And there are rules in place now to stop people from messing around with time. We can’t take him to a hospital because they’d run him through the system. We have to keep things as close to the regular chain of events as possible. Having somebody at the hospital realize there’s two of him running around would lead to a whole other set of problems.”

“And you’re just going to follow the rules! You’re just going to sit back and watch as your friend bleeds out and dies!” Jim shouts. “Screw that.”

“I didn’t say that!” Old-Jim is just as loud in his yelling. “We’re not going to take him to a hospital. But we are going to get him a doctor.”

“What?”

Old-Jim glances back down at the man he calls Bones, who is once again unconscious. “We’re going to Mississippi.”

◦◦◦

_Now_

McCoy watches as the man with his face groans slowly before opening his eyes. The man stretches, not quite trying to sit up, but flinches once and gives up on that series of movements.

“You had some deep abdominal lacerations, but they looked worse than they were.” The man looks up at McCoy for a second before immediately looking away and glancing around the room. Guess he wasn’t the only one unsettled by looking back at his own face.

“Jim?” This older McCoy – Bones - calls.

Teenage Jim at his side is the one who answers right as his patient catches sight of older Jim still asleep atop the other bed. “He, ah, he drove most of the way from Iowa.”

“Figures.” Bones glances back at McCoy and catches the way McCoy’s been watching him. Bones flushes just the bit that McCoy knows means he’s feeling self-conscious. He remembers that expression from catching sight of himself in his suit in the mirror on his wedding day. He wasn’t quite sure that he could pull off his own skin.

“You have my readings.” Bones says, making grabby motions for the instrument. McCoy hands it over and then proceeds to unclip the IV still attached from the blood transfusion.

Bones glances over the numbers, but McCoy knows there really isn’t anything extraordinary there. Bones clears his throat, “And what year would this be, exactly?”

“2249.” 

“Hmm. And Jim just had to go around picking you two up like people are freaking collectible action figures and he needed the whole set of us.” Bones mutters.

“Actually, you wrecked in my barn. He didn’t need to go looking to find me.” Jim says.

“You’re Starfleet.” McCoy states.

Bones knows exactly what he’s getting at, but all he says is, “Yeah.” Nothing about how that worked with a wife and a kid. How he enlisted in the first place.

“And he’s your captain.” Jim asks. Jim must’ve seen them in uniform to see the command stripes at some point.

“Yup.” Bones pops his p. He looks back over at old-Jim. Then he sighs. “You should wake him. We can’t stay here. The sooner we can figure out how to get back to where we’re supposed to be the better.”

◦◦◦

_Then_

Old-Jim looks directly at Jim. “Do you have the keys for the pickup?” He says.

“I can get them.” Jim runs into the house, carefully picking his way across the debris strewn yard.

He finds them in the junk drawer in the kitchen next to a box of thumbtacks, some nail clippers, and a stack of takeout menus.

As Jim steps back over the squeaky stair on the porch, he hopes the engine will start. There’s a reason he’d been fixing up his bike instead of driving the truck.

He stops in the blown-out wall of the barn when he sees Old-Jim kneeling over Bones, Old-Jim’s got Bones’ slack face in his hands.

“Don’t leave me. You are not allowed to give up on me now.” He croaks out a laugh. “Just think of all the times I’ve pulled through. You’ve got at least a dozen more near-deaths until we’re even.”

Old-Jim strokes the hair back out of Bones’ face.

Jim swallows, takes a step back. Feels like he’s intruding. He surveys the blood-spattered, dirtied, partially ripped uniforms the men are wearing and turns back to the house.

When he’s back again with a stack of flannel work shirts and jeans, Old-Jim is more composed. He’s opened a storage compartment on what’s left of the underside of the shuttle.

“What is that?” Jim asks, motioning to the stack of crates in the small hold.

Old-Jim grimaces. “Well, they were going to be medical relief supplies to the people of Xantos III, but not anymore. Can you back the truck up over here?”

Jim tosses the clothing at Old-Jim before turning back to the pickup.

When Jim cranks the keys in the ignition, by some miracle, the truck starts. He helps Old-Jim maneuver one of the crates into the flatbed. They brace Bones and haul him into the backseat.

Jim spends most of the twelve-hour trip that he’s awake for in a tense silence, with a white-knuckle grip on a tricorder, watching Bones’ readings for movement up or down.

◦◦◦

_Now_

“The sooner we can figure out how to get back to where we’re supposed to be, the better.” Bones says.

McCoy feels his stomach drop out from under him. Oh shit. He checks the time. His shift is over. The shift he’d just walked out on. Which, at the time he wasn’t too worried about because he’d thought he was getting _abducted_. That he was going to die.

“Mph.” The older blond groans when teenage-Jim shakes him.

Bones is slowly easing into an upright position, yanking at the headboard behind him.

“You’re gonna want to go back to Iowa right? That’s the first place anybody will try and look for you.” Jim is saying.

“Yeah, they’ll trace the shuttle’s location beacon. We want to be easy to find.”

Old-Jim snaps awake at that, “Bones? You all good?”

“Right as rain. But we’ve got to get this show on the road.” Bones says.

They’re all moving. All three of them packing up the crate of med equipment and cleaning the general detritus left over from the sterile bandage packaging.

McCoy holds up a hand. “Wait.” He says it quietly, but all three of them stop to look at him.

“You can’t just leave. I need to keep _him_ ,” he jerks a nod at Bones, “under observation for at least six hours in case he needs another transfusion.” Bones grimaces. Doctors really do make the worst patients. “But as of twenty minutes ago, I also need to be at home to watch Joanna.” Him and Jocelyn worked opposite shifts.

McCoy doesn’t know why he expected them to react like sane rational people and accept the fact they’d have to stick around Mississippi for a few hours longer.

Teenaged Jim just looks confused. Bones’ expression would be hard to read if he wasn’t the same person as McCoy. It’s a mix of consternation at the thought of being kept from his destination, some dread that McCoy attributes to Jocelyn and reaffirms his suspicions of divorce, and affection for Joanna.

Older Jim though, he absolutely beams, clapping his hands together in excitement, “We can take her with us.”

Which is how McCoy finds himself, not even an hour later squeezing into his seat in the pickup, with a diaper bag on his lap. It’s a tight fit with three men, an almost-grown man, and a baby in accompanying car seat.

McCoy wouldn’t have been sour about it. Except for the life of him, he cannot understand how every other man here – teenage Jim included – is better with Jo than he is. McCoy’s her father, dammit!

“Oh, stop cooing at her, she needs to sleep.” Bones says.

Jim waves a finger near Joanna and she grabs at it and makes a gurgly-giggle. “Just let me enjoy this, you know I never got to meet her at this age.” Which implies that Jim had gotten to meet her in the future.

McCoy looks over at teenage Jim behind the wheel and shares a commiserating glance with him.

“Eyes on the road, kid.”

◦◦◦

_Fourteen Hours Later_

Gravel crunches under the pickup’s wheels as it turns down the driveway. Jim feels a wash of dread when he sees Frank’s beater parked out in front of the house.

There’s a second of silence after Jim kills the engine. Then the slam of the screen-door hitting the framing.

“You’ve got some nerve coming back here! When I get my hands on you, I will tan your hide!” Frank is livid. He’s seen the barn, then.

Jim gets out of the truck and freezes as Frank comes toward him.

Frank stops short, finally taking in all the other men piling out of the truck.

“Wh-” Frank doesn’t manage to get the word out before Bones clocks him with a fist straight to the temple.

Frank lists sideways and crumples to the ground, out cold.

“Oh, I have been waiting so long for the chance to do that.” Bones vibrates on the spot.

“You better not have re-opened any of those wounds!” This comes from the younger Bones, that Jim thinks of as the doctor. Even though he supposes that both Bones are equally as doctorly.

And then they’re moving on. Jim gets put on Joanna-watching duty as the other three men play a game of ‘I Spy the Emergency Beacon’ in the fields surrounding the barn.

Apparently, when your shuttle gets cut in half by a trans-dimensional portal closing on it, the contents of said shuttle have a habit of falling to the ground in a dispersed pattern over the path of the crash-landing.

Bones taps-out due to his injuries and swaps tasks with Jim about an hour in, so when Jim almost trips over a shiny rectangular box, not even two meters into the field, he thinks, ‘It can’t be this easy.’

It is that easy. The nice thing about time travel is that the logistical retrieval issues get worked out in the future, where they have all the time in the world to figure it out and make it work. All Old-Jim and Bones have to do is power-on the beacon and they’ll get transported right out of this timeline.

It’s a very strange set of goodbyes, saying farewell to your future-self and the man whose life you sort-of helped to save. Two men he’s known less than a day, and yet one of them probably knows him better than he knows himself. And with the other, it almost doesn’t feel like a goodbye at all. His younger counterpart is standing right next to Jim.

Old-Jim claps him on the back before pulling him close and whispering in his ear, “Keep an eye on Bones for me, he’ll be good for you.”

When they pull apart, Old-Jim starts cooing, “Bye-bye, little miss Jo-Jo.”

The doctors share a weirdly resolute handshake.

Jim moves to Bones for a goodbye and the man pulls him into a tight embrace. Just like Old-Jim, he leaves Jim with some parting words, “Do not stay with that asshole uncle of yours. You’ve got people who care about you.” Bones’ eyes flick over to the younger doctor where he’s doing his own goodbye with Old-Jim. Bones plants a kiss on his forehead before letting go.

Jim waves one hand as he watches Old-Jim and Bones activate the beacon and a moment later disappear into the ether.

“What now?” Jim questions and turns to the young doctor.

“You’re asking me? I think it’s time for me to get home and take a nap.” Bones blanches.

“What?”

Bones groans and runs a hand down his face. “Just realized, I left my ride in the hospital parking lot.”

Jim laughs, “Guess you’re stuck with me now, Bones.”

“I’m never going to find out where that stupid nickname came from, am I?”

**Author's Note:**

> I love a good time travel and this was just going to be an excuse to write a younger Jim and Bones interacting, but then it took on a life of its own.
> 
> In case it wasn't clear, all points of view here are from the Jim and Bones of 2249. If I have my timeline correct, that makes Jim 16, Bones 22, and Joanna somewhere between a newborn and a 1 year old. This also assumes Bones skipped a couple grades somewhere. Depending on how far accelerated you think he is, he's either still in med school and not yet technically a full doctor or just graduated.


End file.
